"On the Shoulders of Hobbits" by Louis Markos

I first read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s, using what I didn’t know were pirated editions published by Ballantine. I reread authorized editions in the mid-1970s, and again in the early 2000s when the Peter Jackson movies were released. My youngest and I saw the movies three times each at the movie theater. We also watched the DVD of each movie. And the extended DVD set. 

I read The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis in the mid-to-late 1980s, when our oldest was six or seven years old and loved being read to. The hands-down favorite character for all of us was Reepicheep the Mouse, a humble character called to great things much like Tolkien’s Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. 

Over the years, I’ve bought a lot of books by and about Lewis and Tolkien. On one of our trips to England, I spent two hours in Blackwell’s Bookshop on Broad Street in Oxford; I stared in wonder at the whole section devoted to the two authors and the Inklings. If there is heaven on earth, it is called Blackwell’s in Oxford.

Facebook has taught me that I am not alone in my admiration for Lewis and Tolkien. We are legion.

When a scholar like Louis Markos publishes a book about both authors, it’s an event for Lewis and Tolkien fans like myself. And rather than rehash what we already know, On the Shoulders of Hobbits takes a fascinatingly different approach – it considers The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia as guideposts to the classical virtues, like courage, friendship, temperance, discernment, justice, faith, hope, and love.

Louis Markos

Markos begins with the road, or the journey, featured in both of the works. He considers the call of the road, the response to it, its dangers, and what happens at the end. The road isn’t necessarily a physical one; it can be any kind of extended task that’s fraught with difficulties and where the outcome is by no means certain. He moves then to discuss the classical and the theological virtues, and the roles they play in both stories. And then he examines the idea and problem of evil, and how it is portrayed, confronted, and battled. 

Markos is a professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University. He speaks widely on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Christian worldview. His books include Atheism on Trial, Apologetics for the 21^stCentury, From Achilles to Christ, Worldview Guides to The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, C.S. Lewis: An Apologist for Education, Lewis Agonistes, Literature: A Student’s Guide, and Heaven and Hell: Vision of the Afterlife in the Western Poetic Tradition. He lives with his family in Houston. 

On the Shoulders of Hobbits also serves a good reminder that great stories about virtues, the call of the road, and fighting evil aren’t only for the young. That’s what the book is ultimately about – what good stories like these can teach us, no matter what our age or experience or station in life. 

After all, Frodo Baggins was 50 when he leaves the Shire with the ring to travel to Rivendell.

Related: The Road is Long, and the Call is Loud - at Literary Life.

"On Reading Well" by Karen Swallow Prior

It was my great blessing to have had excellent English teachers from seventh grade through college. They each had a gift of teaching, but they each also had a passion for what they were teaching. They took me behind the story so that I could see it was a story, yes, but it was also a lesson about life, an inspiration, a pathway of imagination, a structure through which poured ideas, beliefs, assertions, and principles.

And this was fiction I’m talking about.

I saw courage and struggle in The Old Man and the Sea. I found basic ideas of good and evil in Great Expectations and David Copperfield. I learned about pride and ambition in Julius Caesar. I was taught about people and race in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I fought against impossible odds and experienced what it meant to be the odd man out in Don Quixote. And I read in The Canterbury Tales that human nature was the same in the 20^th(and 21^st) century as it was in the 14^th.

My English teachers have an heir. Her name is Karen Swallow Prior. She teaches at Liberty University in Virginia. She’s published several works, including Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (2012) and Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More, Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (2014). And she’s just published On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

The Four Cardinals

No, it’s not about my hometown’s baseball team or officials in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. It’s about the four cardinal virtues. And as C.S. Lewis explains in Mere Christianity, that’s “cardinal” as in “pivotal.”

Prudence. Temperance. Justice. Fortitude.

They’re in short supply these days. They even sound so old-fashioned and dated. Two have taken on somewhat different meanings – Temperance became anti-alcohol back in the late 19th century and Justice these days is usually translated somewhere in the vicinity of “my rights.”

But they’re important, these four. They’re even more important than when C.S. Lewis first wrote about them.

In the 1940s, most people could still recognize and define them.

Today we think to have Prudence must mean you’re a prude.

And yet.

As a society, we are not so far gone that we can’t recognize the virtues. We instinctively know what Justice is – fairness, which, as Lewis says, includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness and keeping promises, among other things. Prudence – thinking out what you’re doing or planning to do and understanding what will result from it. Temperance is doing things in a measured, balanced way.

I like how Lewis describes Fortitude: “…Fortitude includes both kinds of courage – the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that ‘sticks it’ under pain. ‘Guts’ is perhaps the nearest modern English. You will notice, of course, that you cannot practice any of the other virtues very long without bringing this one into play.”

I also like that he capitalizes them. They are something beyond common nouns.

We live in a coarse culture, in a coarse time. Our elected officials embarrass us but we’ll keep reelecting them. (The problems with Congress are not new; it was Mark Twain who said that Judas Iscariot was nothing more than a premature congressman.) Our celebrities are, well, just that, celebrities, who behave as if popularity connotes wisdom and intelligence.

The differences between Christians and culture should be sharpening, but I see little of that. It’s more like we’re becoming more like the culture, not less. Making our music sound just like the music of popular culture isn’t going to make us relevant, but something else just might.

Something like living the cardinal virtues: Prudence, Temperance, Justice, Fortitude.


Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter have been hosting our discussion of Mere Christianity. To see more posts on this week’s chapter, “The ‘Cardinal Virtues,’” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.